I've got a couple of external drives I use for backup and storage. They're not plugged often I mostly plug & copy the file from / to the drive as I need. Once in a while (like each 6 months) I do a little check on them... and they kinda all fail.

I'm testing one this morning... everything looks fine in Acronis drive monitor (disk is like 8 days of power on time since purchase)... but I started a scandisk with full disk check for badblocks just to be sure and... it has a lot. It had none when I purchased it... I always do a full drive check before copying data.

What should / could I do to prevent this?

8 years ago

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There's not much you can do, just be sure to store them in a dry place, and be careful when you have to move them.
What's their brand anyway?
Seagate drives, as well as most low-end Western Digital models, are known to have really high failure rates, while Hitachi drives are almost indestructible, and Toshiba drives are also quite reliable.

A few useful articles (they don't really talk about external drives, but there isn't too much of a difference with internal drives anyway):
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/

8 years ago
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  • dry place... not much I can do in my house... humidity rarely goes below 50%.
  • they haven't moved in more than a year.

Brands... well... one is a Western Digital and the other is a Lacie (Seagate). I haven't tested my 3e lacie yet (Hitachi).
Stores only keeps those two brands... so I really had no choise.

I'm starting to think... perhaps I should make a small pc and throw all those disk in so they would spin 24/7... that way I could perhaps automate a scandisk or Something like that each week.

8 years ago
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Perhaps that would be the best choice, there're even systems made exactly for that purpose (the so-called NAS, network assisted storage).
And the drives made for NAS systems are usually quite sturdy, being engineered to be on 24/7.

8 years ago
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I heard about those... but are'nt they made only for raid? Which would require special drives.

Do you have any recommandations?

8 years ago
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No, all consumer drives use exactly the same interface (SATA), whether they're used for RAID or not.
There're drives that use a slightly different interface (SAS), but those are used only for high-powered servers.

As for recommendations, I don't follow the hardware market closely anymore, so I can't really help in that department...
Besides, I don't even know where would you buy it.

Google is your friend!

8 years ago
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Ty. I'll check while my drive does the scandisk... still 6 hours to go.

I vaguely remember a news I read somewhere about WD adding a firmware block to their drive to prevent people using non Red drive from being usable in Raid... not sure if it applies to NAS.

8 years ago
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really specific problem xD
thats the kind of thing I would ask r/pcmasterrace about

8 years ago
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